Novel Folklore: On Sadegh Hedayat's The Blind Owl by Jason Reza Jorjani

Author:Jason Reza Jorjani [Jorjani, Jason Reza]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Zoroastrianism, Transhumanism, Comparative religion, Fairy tales, Persian literature, UFOs, Sadegh Hedayat
ISBN: 9781642641059
Publisher: Counter-Currents Publishing
Published: 2018-05-22T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

THE EIGHTH CLIME

That The Blind Owl takes place in two different times, namely modern Tehran and medieval Rey, should be obvious to any reader. What is less obvious is that it also takes place in a third time (and an eighth clime). When the narrator meets the hearse driver again after he loses his way, he feels that, with the lantern lights of the ethereal girl’s eyes now extinguished, he could not care less whether he arrives at no place whatsoever.289 He does not realize that those are lanterns shining a dark light that cannot be extinguished, and that they will draw him, like a moth to the flame, right into her own unearthly world—which is, indeed, the land of no place. It is a twilight zone that is everywhere and nowhere. You might wander into it just around the next bend, but it lies beyond the outer limits. I am referring to the third time and place that we visit in The Blind Owl, the one incomparably other than the “present” of modern Tehran or the “past” of medieval Rey. It is equally accessible to the narrator from both of those epochal milieus, assuming he can enter a certain “mood” that is “like the weather before the storm breaks” when “the real world” recedes from him and he lives “in a radiant world incalculably remote from that of earth.”290

The narrator crosses over into this otherworldly realm on no less than five separate occasions. The first is on the way from Tehran to Shah Abdo’l Azim, to bury the dismembered ethereal girl.291 The second is on the way from the burial site back to Tehran.292 The third occasion, which is the first during the past life in Rey, comes to pass when the narrator sneaks out of his house without his nanny or wife/mother noticing, with the intention of running away to someplace where nobody will ever find him again.293 He takes some little “cakes” with him in his pockets, which is interesting given that this is the food of the fairies. He also tells us that once he slips out of the house, his gait reverts to that of his carefree childhood, and he almost feels as if he could take flight:

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